Comrade:Cassette/notes/Communist party of canada

My notes from their program

The Development of Capitalism in Canada

What was the basis for imposing early colonial structures

• Mercantile capitalism through the trade of fish, fur and timber with the colonies and France and Britain.  

Mercantile capitalism eventually gave way to?

• larger-scale operations, especially in forestry and shipbuilding, were started.

Who's capital was Canada dominated by at first and who did that change to?

• Canada was under the domination of British capital. Early in the 20th century however, trade and debt dependence on Britain was gradually replaced with an even more debilitating dependence on U.S. capital and technology.  

Which economic structures did US gain control of

• Manufacturing and natural resources

What did this result in?

• Canada becoming more integrated into and more dependent on the U.S. economy than any other developed capitalist country.  
• The growing presence of U.S. and other transnationals increased pressures for the exploitation of Canadian natural resources. It has also led to a massive and growing outflow of profits, interest, fees, and other transfers, stifling new development, jobs, and research, and easing the political and cultural penetration of U.S. imperialism.

State Monopoly Capitalism

What is state monopoly capitalism?

• merging of the interests of finance capital with the state

What does finance capital use the state for?

• to provide orders, capital and subsidies, and to secure foreign markets and investments

Monopoly capital supports the expansion of the state sector – both services and enterprises – when that serves its interests, and at other times it uses the state to cut back and privatize.

How does state-monopoly capitalism undermine bourgeois democracy?

• Big business openly intervenes in the electoral process on its own behalf, and also indirectly through a network of pro-corporate institutes and think tanks. It uses its control of mass media to influence the ideas and attitudes of the people, and to blatantly influence election results. It corrupts the democratic process through the buying of politicians and officials. It tramples on the political right of the Canadian people to exercise any meaningful choice, thereby promoting widespread public alienation and cynicism about the electoral process.

What does International finance capital also require?

• Institutions of regulation ratified and supported by the imperialist states to protect and advance their interests. It has amplified the role of existing international capitalist institutions – the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank – to enforce its global hegemony, as well as numerous regional economic blocs to protect the interests of the respective imperialist centres. These powerful international structures undermine national and state sovereignty, thus giving rise to new conflicts and contradictions in the system of monopoly capitalist regulation.

Canadian Capital and the TNCs

What does Canada have the highest level of among imperialist countries

• Foreign ownership

What is Canadian finance capital largely interlocked with?

• U.S. transnationals and international finance capital in general

What has intensified this process of capitalist integration under U.S. domination?

• Imposition of neo-liberal policies especially under the free trade agreement

Canadian monopoly groupings control many sectors of the economy and control the Canadian state, but international finance capital – primarily U.S.-based TNCs – control substantial parts of the resource, manufacturing and service industries

What does this result in?

• Important decisions on investment policy, technological change, plant closures and layoffs are made outside our borders. No sector of Canada’s economy is free from U.S. and other transnational influence.

Capitalism Generates Crises

What led to Keynesianism being implemented?

• widely implemented during the prolonged post-W.W.II economic boom to stabilize capitalist economies, weaken and deflect the militancy and internationalism of working class movements and weaken the powerful attraction of the socialist alternative.

What was the impact of these policies

• Keynesian prescriptions helped capitalist governments to temporarily ease the worst effects of cyclical crises but ultimately failed to prevent them. It also tended to inhibit international capital flows and TNC activity, and in general submerged the capitalist state in staggering public debt, the servicing costs of which were borne primarily by working people.

What brought us out of Keynesianism?

• By the mid-1970s, finance capital turned towards neoliberalism. Under the slogan of a “return to the free market,” capitalist governments in Canada and elsewhere began to impose a vicious, pro-corporate and anti-people agenda which included liberalized or “free” trade, deregulation and privatization, corporate tax cuts, an intensified assault on labour and democratic rights, and various measures to drive down real incomes and living standards of working people to the benefit of the banks and monopolies.

What were the consequences of this?

• It was successful in temporarily halting and reversing the decline in the rate of profit, and accelerated the accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling capitalist elite. This forced a decline in the purchasing power of the vast majority of the people which led to a decline in aggregate demand for commodities and services.

How was the decline in the purchasing power handled?

• Extending cheap credit which increased the debt load borne by households and governments alike.

What did this debt bubble lead to?

• the “great economic meltdown” of 2007-08 – the largest, most widespread and protracted capitalist crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Production and international trade collapsed, and mass unemployment and poverty soared in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere around the world. The ruinous consequences of neoliberalism stood fully exposed.

Since the ruling circles of finance capital have refused to change course and turned to being bailed out, austerity measures and wage cuts which has resulted in?

• real economic growth in GDP has remained stagnant, while government and household indebtedness have grown even larger than 2007-08 levels, setting the stage for another, even more devastating capitalist crisis.

Productivity, Unemployment and the Working Class

What has increased exploitation and alienation of the working class and is accelerating the antagonism of the two classes

• Technological and scientific progress

What is a general way it is doing this?

• Technology is used to lower production costs by replacing human labor with machines

How has this impacted the manufacturing industry?

• Workers in manufacturing (with the exception of auto assembly) have been reorganized into smaller hi-tech production units where smaller groups of precariously employed workers are isolated from the mainstream of organized workers. This has broken up the collectivization of what has been the most militant and organized portion of the industrial working class

How does this increase the gulf between the working people and finance capital?

• The more technological progress there is, the higher the productivity rate, the higher the rate of exploitation, and the higher the intensity of labour, deepening the gulf between finance capital and working people. The longer hours and increased physical and mental stress demanded of the individual worker has a negative effect on the health and safety of all workers.
• My note: this makes me think of one of the reasons Chris Smalls and others organized a union at Amazon because having to keep up with the machines made the work dangerous and stressful.

How is work over digital platforms (like remote work) changing working conditions?

• Creating a shift towards hiring employees on a short-term, temporary basis, without fixed hours, wages or benefits. They are usually classified as "independent contractors." Terms and conditions of work are often controlled from other geographic jurisdictions, beyond the reach of labour standards legislation or guidelines, subject to change without consultation. Workers are often placed in competition with each other and may never meet in person.

What is rapidly intensifying the contradictions in tech these days?

• Advancements in AI: AI has the potential to enhance the health and quality of life for all humanity, to facilitate scientific breakthroughs to reverse environmental destruction and climate change, and to sharply reduce necessary labour-time, increase leisure time, etc. But under capitalist relations, AI research is instead directed to enhance the profits of employers by eliminating whole categories of human-based labor, at the expense of workers, their families and communities, and toward military applications (such as lethal autonomous weapon systems) which could threaten all humanity. Unless reversed, this path will lead to the widespread marginalization and pauperization of the working class, to the further degradation of labour and democratic rights, and to aggression and war.

What does Tech do that doesn't benefit transnationals and financial groups?

• Tech innovation is very expensive and it's application intensifies the tendency for the rate of profit to fall

How does finance capital try to offset this tendency of the declining rate of profit?

1. driving down its labour costs through wage cuts, benefits cuts, pension cuts, speed-ups, lengthening the work day, contract work, redundancies, plant shutdowns, and other forms of corporate restructuring
2. absorbing or merging with its competitors
3. redistributing income from the working people to the capitalist class through taxation policies
4. privatizing parts of the public sector and turning them into new sources of profit
5. forcing open access to new markets through trade and investment agreements and, where necessary, through military aggression

How does the increased mobility of capital harm the workers?

• enhancing transportability of production: In expanding numbers and types of industries, capital can respond to strikes or workers’ demands by quickly – and almost seamlessly – relocating entire production processes on a permanent or temporary basis.

How does the domination of advanced tech by U.S. transnationals further undermine Canadian independence and sovereignty?

• inhibit's research and development and reduces the availability of skilled and high tech jobs to Canadian workers

How are the high costs of modernizing the economy with the latest tech paid for?

• It is financed by the profits from exploiting the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, capital bled from the most exploited and impoverished countries by the transnational corporations, and through vast government handouts to commerce and industry paid for by the taxes of the working people.

What have free trade agreements resulted in?

• de-industrialization and the export of hundreds of thousands of jobs, creating a large pool of unemployed people who are used to drive down wages and working conditions of the employed and organized workforce.

What is one of the tools used that threatens state sovereignty and democracy in the free trade agreements

• Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses: a tribunal of corporate lawyers can overrule state domestic, health, environmental and financial legislation. A trans-national corporation that claims it has been denied current or future profits from the application of these laws can sue the state. These corporate appointed tribunals allow the lawyers to rotate between serving as “judges” and bringing cases for corporations against governments – a conflict of interest that should be illegal in law. Only corporations can sue the state. The state cannot sue corporations.

What is the best way to counteract all this?

• International working class unity and solidarity

How has this impacted unemployment?

• While job creation has tended to expand the engineering, research and hi-tech sector of workers, the rate of job formation has dipped below the rate of growth of the population as a whole. Higher levels of permanent unemployment and underemployment have become a mass phenomenon, independent of cyclical recovery and boom.
• Canada faces the tragic consequences of having a generation of young people, many of whom may never work full-time or never work at all. Unemployed workers labeled “older” by employers are discriminated against and being denied re-entry into the labour force because of inadequate skills and the unprofitability of retraining them for a relatively brief remaining work life.

How does the growth in part-time, temporary and contract work impact workers

• Regressive labour legislation often denies these workers minimum wage guarantees, job protection, social security benefits or the right to organize. This separates many part-time workers from the workforce as a whole and particularly from the trade union movement